There are many situations in which it may be desired to limit the amount of bandwidth utilized by a specific group of processes transferring data over a network. For example, it is often of interest to limit the bandwidth usage of certain user processes traversing one or more segments inside a network in order to reserve network resources for other user processes sharing the same set of network segments. It may also be desired to bound the aggregate bandwidth of a group of processes between a specific set of servers and clients, so that the residue bandwidth resources in front of the servers may be used by other user processes connected with the same set of servers. In what follows, a virtual link control system is presented to realize the functionality of the aforementioned aggregate bandwidth control.